


Death Drive

by larvae



Category: Mindhunter (TV 2017)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Hybristophilia, M/M, POV Holden Ford, Porn With Plot, Present Tense, Season/Series 01, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2020-12-14 21:55:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21022859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/larvae/pseuds/larvae
Summary: ... we no longer call the contrasting tendencies egoistic and sexual instincts, but life-instincts and death-instincts.-- Sigmund Freud; Beyond the Pleasure PrincipleA deep dive into Agent Holden Ford's psychosexual hang ups.Updates Sundays.On hiatus.





	1. Episode 1

“Fuck.”

Raspy. Breathy. A good sign.

“Shit!”

Louder. Breathless. Encouraging.

“Finger my pussy.”

Demanding, and vulgar in a way that simple disjointed profanity wasn’t. It gives him pause enough to stop fucking her and furrow his eyebrows. He lifts his head from the crook of her neck and looks down.

“Finger my pussy and I’ll give you a blowjob.”

Ah. It hurts — in a vain, egotistical way he hates admitting to — that she would take this opportunity for a jab. For a moment Holden feels that the whole affair, the siren’s song she’d sung to lure him into her unmade double bed, was the world’s longest set up. He could almost feel the weighty silence of an unappreciative audience. It might be his own.

But then she smiles, and he can’t help but smile with her. It’s flattering, in a way. It means she’d actually been listening to him, that she’d actually taken interest.

“There, all the bad words used in a sentence.”

It's odd to think about work during sex. It is odd to associate his work with sex. Holden has never had reason to consider his sex life deviant, or worthy of deviant terminology. That’s not to say his work is devoid of sex. There has just always been a sort of dividing line. Deviant and aberrant behavior, and normal red-blooded American sex. Love making. Not an activity you’d put on the same list as necrophilia and lust murder, which matched it on the loosest mechanical terms.

He laughs and shakes the thought from his mind. He keeps fucking her.

** _x — x — x_ **

Special Agent Bill Tench is a large man with an old fashioned face and an out of date crew cut. He looks like he walked out of a stack of GI Joe comics and put on a grey suit. This is who Shepherd considers a back room boy? He looks like he could be printed on recruitment posters. Bill Tench wants YOU to join the educational arm of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Holden’s palm sweats when he offers his hand. And he’s holding a lunch tray, no chance to casually wipe the sweat off on his shirt. Ah well, blame it on the stuffy building. No, don’t mention it at all. When he offers Holden a cigarette he can’t think of how to decline. Maybe Debbie was right and he did need to get out more.

“You’re what they call a blue flamer, you know what that is?”

“No.” But he might be able to guess.

“You’re so eager to do good you have a big blue flame shooting out of your asshole.” Ah, how colorful. Holden isn’t used to perfect strangers talking so openly about his asshole.

“Oh, is that bad?” 

“Just take it slow. You’ll get there.” There’s genuine fatherly compassion in his voice as he says it. It makes Holden feel like he’s known him for years.

He describes his road school, giving powerpoint presentations to beat cops. He frames it as a two way street in the way that a parent assures that house centipedes are just as scared of you as you are of them. You can learn from them. You can keep a finger on the pulse of what’s out there, how crimes are being solved in real time.

“But it's a big job, you know? I'm up to my neck in local law enforcement.” He lets a pause stretch out between them.

“Would you want some help with that?” Holden doesn’t want to help him with that.

“Maybe we could help each other.” Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Crystal clear and all out on the table. Exactly unlike how it’s been with Debbie lately. Is she seeing anyone else? That she scratches his back isn’t up for debate but does he scratch hers? Is she using him? Is she being honest with him? Why is he thinking about that now?

** _x — x — x_ **

Their first stop is Iowa, where the salt of the earth police force is less than receptive to analytical frameworks and academic concepts. The projector is heavy and the air is sticky, weighed down with humidity and chirping cicadas. Their modest budget puts Bill and Holden in a motel with a broken ice machine. They roll up their sleeves and head out to the pool.

They sit on lounge chairs with drooping slats and Holden watches Bill take long sips of beer between long drags of his cigarette. The slowly setting summer sun turns the overly chlorinated water into diamonds.

It feels intimate in a way that fucking Debbie doesn’t. She keeps her walls high, where Bill radiates a near blinding degree of authenticity. His cards are face up on the table. He approaches with an open palm. He’s a chain smoking, ex-military, fed with a beer gut. His lack of charm is disarming in its sincerity. Debbie is bewitching, like predatory silhouettes in dappled forest light. Why is he comparing the two?

Holden realizes they’re the two most prominent figures in his life. They certainly eclipse his family, who aren’t estranged but with whom he cannot remember his last conversation. He has only Shepherd to hold them up against, with whom his interactions have been on the other side of cordial but generally brief. Who else has he spoken to at such lengths about such things? Bank robbers and suicide threats? He thinks of how the motel room they’re sharing, with its double beds and twin night stands, has seen more life since their check in than his sparsely furnished apartment has seen since his move in.

“Holden?”

He snaps back to the present. To late summer in Iowa. To the pool shining cotton candy pink and blue as the watercolor sunset above breathes its last.

“Forget it,” Bill huffs.


	2. Episode 2

“He's gonna take the fucking thing away from you, he’s gonna kill you with it, and then he’s gonna have sex with your face.”

Bill delivers his morose prediction in the same stoic, fatherly tone as he delivers any grotesque or unpalatable detail from their work. His smile seems sly, like despite disapproving of Holden’s pet project he’s charmed by it. In spite of himself. In spite of his general distaste for Holden’s methodology. For Holden.

Holden tries not to think about how clearly he can see the outline of his dick through his grey boxer briefs. He realizes his mouth feels dry.

They drive the hundred odd miles to Solano State Prison in relative silence, Holden resting his temple against the passenger side window on occasion to watch the rural country side go by. It’s nice of Bill to drive him such a distance, especially on his day off.

Bill normally spent his days off golfing, or sitting by the pool, or driving around idly without Holden in the car, or taking multiple unnecessary trips to the ice machine just to get out of their shared room. Holden can respect him needing his space. Especially considering the hours they put in together outside of road school. They drank their morning and afternoon coffee together (Bill with so much sugar that Holden expects to see a snowy hill rise in the middle of his cup). They ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, sometimes with the luxury of a table but mostly off the hood of Bill’s rental, or else off of their laps inside of it. They got ready for bed together, so much so that Holden had taken to leaving the TV on when he was at home brushing his teeth, to replicate the familiar feeling of Bill waiting his turn at the sink. They slept side by side on sets of twin beds that wrought havoc on their aching backs, plagued in the daytime by desk work, road trips, and air travel.

But for a man who needed his space Bill showed a stunning disinterest in privacy.

He was perpetually in one or another state of undress. When they sat down to eat he unbuttoned his starched collar, having left his tie in the car. He lounged after work, watching local news channels in his undershirt and his boxers. They had been traveling for long enough that Holden had seen every pair he owned. He rolled up his sleeves and took off his shoes at every chance he got.

Did Bill keep his socks on when he fucked?

It’s hard to imagine him completely naked, maybe because Holden has seen him so close to it so many times that his mind’s eye has draped a permanent modesty panel over him. 

It’s hard to imagine him fucking Nancy, not to say he’s devoted much time or effort to the exercise. Straight-laced old fashioned under the covers missionary with the lights off? Even then he can’t put a face to the voice he’s overheard from so many hotel phones. Does Bill fuck his wife? Or does he make love to his wife? Do they have a word they use for it? It’s hard to imagine Bill being adventurous in bed. Then again, Holden hadn’t been until very recently. And even now Debbie wouldn’t call him adventurous.

Some wires cross and his mind conjures up an image of Bill and Debbie. Holden shakes his head and passes a hand over his face, rubbing the daydream from his eyes. He crosses his legs and leans away from Bill, pressing his shoulder into the passenger side door and balling his fists.

The state correctional facility looms in the distance. Holden swallows and passes his tongue over his dry lips. He feels antsy but not nervous.

He must. Keep his socks on, that is. When he fucks.

** _x — x — x_ **

“Oh yeah. Up a little.”

“Uh-huh.” It was easy to get annoyed by Debbie’s plainly spoken demands over dinner or at her kitchen sink — it was always _Take the side streets we’ll get there faster_ never _I think the side streets might get us there faster”_ — but they had a certain type of appeal in bed. They became less shrill and more… assertive. Confident. Demanding, but in a scintillating kind of way. They made Holden want to listen to her, to be ordered rather than guided. It was nice. It was comforting.

“Over a little.” 

But it did at times make him feel replaceable. Debbie knew exactly what she wanted, so what was stopping her from getting it somewhere else? She still didn’t actually consider Holden adventurous, maybe because his progress hadn’t yet reached _Venus in Furs_ level. But this in particular was new for them, and newer for Holden, who didn’t want to admit struggling to find purchase with his face between her thighs.

“Left.”

“My left or your left?” He feels like he shouldn’t have asked that. Not just directionally, but that he should already know where to find what he’s looking for.

“My left.”

Okay, her left, so he moves his head over to the right. She gasps and he can hear the soft scrape of her fingers curling into the sheets.

Kemper had carried their conversation with the same self-possessed tone Debbie used with him. Maybe they both had that tone all of the time, but Holden could only verify that they had it with him. And that it had an effect.

All of Kemper had an effect. He hadn’t entered the room Holden had been waiting for him in so much as he’d filled it, pushing all the air out of it with the sheer force of his presence. His hand had enveloped Holden’s completely when he shook it, like a bird disappearing into a fox’s mouth.

He had been open and honest about the unfathomable. _It’s not easy butchering people,_ he had confided in him, _it’s hard work._ His voice was low and measured and he rolled his words around his mouth like a fistful of glass marbles. 

He lifts his head suddenly. “Is this okay?”

“It’s fine, why, what’s wrong?”

“Do you need a break?” He falters.

“Why would I want a break?” She sounds breathless but annoyed, “That’s not how this works.” 

The insinuation that Holden has no idea how this works isn’t lost on him.

“Want me to throw something in? Play with your nipples?” 

Kemper’s interest in cop shows and dive bars and his practiced, mild mannered politeness in front of social authority was disarming. Not unlike the way in which Bill was disarming. Stoic and decisive. A man’s man. But where Bill’s honest simplicity was soothing, Kemper’s felt… seductive. When he spoke of his “vocation”, his “oeuvre” — words that stood in for acts so monstrous the Bureau lacked the officially sanctioned vocabulary to describe them — Holden felt as if he were telling him a secret he hadn’t trusted anyone else with. A justification he couldn’t have put before anyone else for the certainty that they would reject it. 

It was a feeling he’d failed to explain to Bill. Most likely because he couldn’t compare the proximity he’d felt with Kemper to the proximity he’d achieved with him. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to draw the parallel. What would he have said, anyway? _When Edmund Kemper tells me about his high stakes hobby, it feels like you walking back into our room from the ice machine in the undershirt you’ve worn for three days in a row._

“Why?”

“Y’know…” Why was he thinking of him? Why was he thinking of either of them? Why had he waited until he got back from California to suggest they try this? “move it along.”

“You’re doing great, just stop stopping”

“Okay,” he plunges his head back down and feels her ankles hook together behind his neck. The pressure of her thighs against his head creates a soft rushing sound in his ears, like the roar of the ocean in a sea shell. Her skin is slick, and warm, and soft, and as far as he can get from the sour sweat and the cheap cigarettes and the angry men in Solano’s cold steel cages. They hadn’t talked about what he’d done in California. Maybe they could after this. Maybe she’d get it.

** _x — x — x_ **

Holden fumbles with the visitor’s restroom door in desperation, his sweaty palm sliding twice off the steel handle. It resists his advances somewhat, the hinges tight from disuse. Solano doesn’t entertain often, it has little need for guest bathrooms.

He scrambles past and falls against the other side of it, letting his jacket drop to the floor. He’d taken it off before Kemper had arrived for their interview and hadn’t bothered to put it back on. He’d been in a rush to get out. 

He locks the door behind him and double checks the handle. Takes a breath. Checks again.

His shaking fingers are nearly useless against his belt buckle and he stumbles to brace himself against the sink before his knees give. White brick rises to meet him above the chipped basin. No mirror. Security risk. Imagine what a man like Edmund Kemper could do with a stray piece of glass. He can. He does. In vivid technicolor.

Holden pulls his hard on out of his pants, turning behind him to check the door again. He feels hyper aware of his surrounds. Every drip from the leaky faucet in front of him suddenly sounds like his mother’s footsteps coming down the hall. It takes a few hard, purposeful swallows to clear up his dry mouth enough to spit in his hand. He has to be quick. The guard charged with escorting him back the way he came is waiting at the end of the hall. No one would believe he had to take a shit bad enough to stay in Solano State Prison for an extra twenty minutes.

That shouldn’t be a problem. He takes his left hand away from the basin, bracing his hip against it and pressing his fingers into his throat, searching for the point on his trachea that Ed had so expertly squeezed between his thumb and forefinger. He had learned the anatomy at some point. Hyoid bone, laryngeal incisure, thyroid cartilage, cricoid cartilage. The exact opposite of an asshole, which will suck your cock right in.

He thinks of how he described it. How his steady, even tone paired with his deft and practiced fingers. When he worked, even in pantomime, he had the hands of a maestro. Of an artisan. 

Would his voice change to that same dead, hollow, inhuman, sound if they fucked? If Holden wanted it? If Holden asked for it? Would he instruct him from above in the same way he had talked about his mother?

_Down. To the left. No, my left. Deeper. Play with my balls, Holden, you don’t wanna forget those. Women are born with this little hole between their legs which every man on earth just wants to stick something into. And here you are; a poor substitute. You’re weak, Holden, so you’ve learned strategies. You’ve deployed your mind, and now you’ve come to utilize your sex. Did this work for you? In New York? Or did you say you hadn’t grown up there? No, don’t answer just yet, Holden. We’ll see how well you talk when I’m done with you._

He gets into Bill’s car and wonders if maybe he can smell it on him. For a moment his palms feel hairy, coated with adolescent guilt. Bill doesn’t seem to notice, he’s got something else on his mind.

Holden is almost disappointed.

** _x — x — x_ **

“If there's one thing I know, it's this: A mother should not scorn her own son. If a woman humiliates her little boy, he will become hostile, and violent, and debased. Period.”

Holden has had his share of first kisses. Some awkward and juvenile, some awkward and inebriated. One with his first cousin at a family reunion in Milwaukee that had been less a meeting of lips and more a gnashing of teeth. His most recent had been with Debbie in the decorated entryway of her apartment. Despite the drinking and despite the reefer it hadn’t been inebriated at all. There was no drunken fumbling or bashful “I’d really like to kiss you”s. They’d simply fallen into place against one another as if they’d been shaped for it.

He and Bill hadn’t fallen together so much as succumbed to the inevitable architectural failing of an enthusiastic lean. Well, Holden had done the leaning and Bill had borne it stoically before seeing it through to its end.

Holden had leaned because it had taken every last ounce of strength he’d had over the past half a dozen weeks not to lean sooner. He leaned because he was tired of waking up in the early morning rutting his hips into the mattress like a frustrated teenager. Tired of taking long showers hoping Bill would barge in to tell him off for hogging all the hot water only to find him with his dick in his hand. Tired of taking his time in cramped airplane bathrooms and dwelling for too long on every insignificant brush of Bill’s hand against his back as he squeezed past him.

For all the reasons Holden could supply for why he leaned he couldn’t conjure the same list for why Bill let him.

They were alone in the Sacramento motel room Holden had booked for them last minute when he’d done it, sitting together on the edge of the same twin bed, its unoccupied counterpart mirrored on their left. He had leaned forward fully expecting Bill to lean back away from him, leaving him to pitch himself over the cliff’s edge and into the abyss. But instead he’d been there to catch him with a hand brought to his jaw and an eager mouth to meet his.

Bill was a good kisser. Caring and attentive, assertive without being demanding or overbearing. He kissed Holden like he knew exactly what he wanted from him, which caught Holden unawares. Bill lead and he followed, perhaps too enthusiastically, if Bill’s smirk in the dark was anything to go by. His hands were strong and sure and the fuck was all American. They rutted against each other on top of the starched floral print sheets and Bill pressed his palm over Holden’s mouth for fear of the paper thin walls.

Maybe he thought of his wife. Or maybe he couldn’t bear to think of her while he still smelled like Solano State Prison. While he was doing wrong by her. He hopped in the shower before doing wrong by her again; three ways ’til Sunday until weary grey daylight broke through the pleated blinds.

They sit next to each other on the plane home and Holden knows this afterglow won’t last. But it’s nice to bask in as it’s happening. They feel like an item. Like an unspoken arrangement. He realizes that he’s felt that way for a while now, and it feels like Bill has finally caught up.

Holden tests his weight against Bill’s arm, letting his shoulders relax and his core muscles go limp so his body falls naturally against his. Bill doesn’t move. In fact, he leans into it so they each prop the other up comfortably against the backs of their tightly spaced seats.

The drive back from Vacaville had been a hundred miles of leaden silence, but the flight home to Quantico was three thousand miles of lively discussion and plans for the future. Bill hadn’t seen the light, but he’d found merit in the idea of pursuing it.

_Je me lance, vers la gloire._


	3. Episode 3

It’s humid in Boston, and the BU campus is crowded. The wing of the building Holden and Bill have to walk towards is far from where they parked. Bill has walked this same path before so it probably doesn’t seem that far to him. It does to Holden.

When they finally reach their destination they are kept waiting. Dr. Carr is finishing her lecture, if they could please have a seat at the bench. Typical, Holden thinks, draping his jacket over his arm. He goes to get a coffee and ruminate on how far this meeting might take them. Bill had spoken very highly of her, and her name had been the first he’d mentioned when they had discussed further developing their project. She would have valuable insight, she works with deviant psychology. Yes but in academia, Holden had countered, those pencil pushing hippie wannabes don’t ever set foot in the field. They don’t see things like we do.

He had gotten an earful for that. Maybe he’d deserved it. Though his frustration at Bill’s suggestion had been genuine, he also liked Bill when he was angry. He liked making it up to Bill when he was angry. He liked how easy it was to do that, now.

So Dr. Carr was an old and esteemed colleague of an old and somewhat accomplished FBI agent. Well, the head and until recently only member of the Behavioral Science Unit, the office of which was in the basement. She taught psychology at Boston University and from what he remembered Bill saying on their drive from the airport, she was up for tenure. So she’d been doing this a while, and Bill expected her to lend a new perspective.

Holden hadn’t expected her to look like that.

She is younger than he thought she’d be, especially having been briefed on her credentials, but she has the cool confidence of an older woman. Her voice is deep and her tone is measured in a way he finds mesmerizing. She is straightforward in the exact opposite way that Bill is straightforward. She is cold and curt where he is warm and open. They seem more than pleased to see each other. They volley some soft jabs between themselves with warm and sincere affection.

Does Wendy know that Bill’s a good kisser? Does she suspect that Holden knows? Did she teach him that? Does she keep her heels on in bed?

Holden is suddenly struck by a vision of Bill kissing the top of her foot before removing her shoe, like prince charming. That seems like something he would do. He can picture it vividly, at any rate. Maybe he’d lift her onto her desk.

Hold on, did she say a book? They could write a book?

“We appreciate the vote of confidence,” says Bill, “but we weren’t even allowed to send you those notes. We can’t publicize what we’re doing.”

“Why not?” she asks. Her brows furrow in confusion and disappointment, like she isn’t used to her ideas being rejected. Especially not by Bill.

“Our department head gave us weekends only and an office in the basement.” No, why is he doing this? Why is he downplaying what they have here? Especially after Wendy — Dr. Carr, was so interested.

“We still have students, we have Road School full time. We can’t just drop everything.”

“Road School?” she asks, and Holden recognizes her expression. Like she’d found a drowned insect in her morning coffee. He’d made that exact face when Bill had first pitched the concept to him.

“We travel around the country and teach FBI techniques to cops,” he explains.

“Oh.” Oh god, they’re losing her.

“We’re seeing Benjamin Miller in Bridgewater this afternoon,” Holden cuts in, desperate to steer the conversation into a more positive direction, “Road School is what gives us the freedom to go out and interview these guys.”

She doesn’t look convinced.

“We can go bit by bit,” he presses on, “Kemper and Miller, and build out from there. We can make a study in our free time, like you said.”

“I didn’t realize that this was so informal,” her voice drops and she looks at Bill, who has his hands folded in his lap and is doing nothing to combat the wet blanket of disenchantment settling across the room.

“We could make it formal,” Holden stammers, “We could do that easily. And then… a book. The successor the The Mask of — “

“I guess I just wanted another set of eyes. Just to see if you thought this was valuable from an academic standpoint.” There is an unmistakable air of finality in the way Bill says it. Like a father imposing cold perspective on his over eager brood.

“Have you shown your Kemper notes to your department head?” her face is hard to read but her tone seems to be searching for something. Probing.

“No.”

“Teaching police departments, can someone else do that?” 

“Anyone can, it’s really not that hard.”

“That’s not true,” Bill says pointedly, “and it’s beside the point.” He looks annoyed and exasperated. Maybe he feels like he and Wendy are ganging up on him. They aren’t. He’s just being sensitive. It’s just that they’re right, they see things the same way.

“Shepard doesn’t even want us to talk about this,” Bill continues, hammering nails into a coffin lid he is still struggling to force shut, “You really think he’s going to say yes to a full-time academic study? Never mind a book?”

God, the book really was exciting. If this could really culminate in a book… Not just an academic article, not just peer review. Commercial publication. His name — their names, on dust jackets. On shelves.

“You really think people would be interested in this outside of law enforcement?” Holden asks. He leans forward more than he should, and can feel his cheeks flush when she mirrors him. Her beautifully defined features swim towards him and he can feel her spacious, tastefully decorated office melt away from behind her. It’s just her pale lips floating in a kind of warm dark, illuminated by the images her words paint through the air.

“I mean, imagine… truly imagine, what it takes to bludgeon someone to death.”

Holden doesn’t have to try too hard, he’s had the hands of a man who's done far worse across his neck. He knows exactly what it took for Edmund Kemper to strangle nine women to death. Very little.

“The lust for control. The feeling of arousal. The decision to rape the severed head of your victim, to humiliate her corpse. How could you possibly get those details from an ordinary police report?”

Would it even be possible to get them across in prose? On a recording? Was there any substitute for watching the abyss open up in the eyes of the person who’d done it?

“You know why it took me nearly a decade to publish my book?” she asks, with a slight tilt of her head, “Because narcissists don’t go to the doctor. Psychopaths are convinced that there is nothing wrong with them.”

But not that they’re normal. Not that they’re ordinary. Ed knows exactly what he did. He knows exactly what it took for him to do it and what it would take for anyone else to do the same. He knows no one else has it in them.

Bill persists in his polite refusal and Holden can do nothing to stop him. He feels like the best opportunity they’ll ever get with this project is not just slipping out of his fingers, but being forced out.

Dr. Carr’s disappointment stays in her hazel eyes as she bids them goodbye like a fly drowned in honey.

“It’s good to get some encouragement, even if our hands are tied,” says Bill, “Thank you.”

Is that something she’s seen before? Bill with his hands tied?

“It’s always a pleasure.” She can’t possibly imagine.

** _x — x — x_ **

“You know, they shoot the birds in the yard because they might be smuggling in drugs,” Holden doesn’t let Bill’s overtly skeptical expression turn into a judgmental silence, “Actually, I don’t know if that’s true. A girlfriend told me once.”

“You date a lot of ex-cons?” Was he teasing? Or did he care what kind of women Holden had dated? Did it matter to him how many? Did it matter to him who they were?

“No.” He must care, otherwise why would he ask? Wasn’t the core of every good joke a kernel of truth? Wouldn’t he really like to know?

“Actually…” Was he qualifying too much? Was it noticeable? Did Bill notice? “Actually, Debbie’s the first girl I’ve really dated-dated since high school.”

“Dated-dated.” Okay, sure, that was stupid, maybe he deserved that.

“Yeah.” Well, repetition is a perfectly valid rhetorical device. It indicates intensity. Palilogia, if he was remembering the term correctly. He hadn’t done that well in sophomore English. Mostly on account of the last girl he’d dated-dated. Or who’d been his girlfriend-girlfriend.

“My wife’s the first woman I’ve married-married.” Girlfriend? Dating? These words seem suddenly juvenile. Especially when weighed against “wife” and “marriage”. Especially weighed against this. This nameless, unspoken thing they now had hanging over and between them that existed separately from any of those terms.

So Nancy was the first woman Bill had married-married, and with a little luck and pixie dust she’d be the last. But was she the first woman he’d bedded? Was Holden the first man? The confidence and surety with which he put his hands on Holden’s body suggested otherwise. Holden hurt his own feelings with the thought.

But, then again, Bill Tench approached everything with strong, steady hands. Maybe this novelty was simply no exception. That still stung. Like he would have preferred to unbalance him.

Could Wendy? Has Wendy? Did she today?

** _x — x — x_ **

They are in Sacramento seated at Detective Roy Carver’s desk, examining grisly photographs of Laura Conway. She was elderly but not frail. Her dog was large and must have been protective of her. There is very little left of either of them that doesn’t look like you could buy it by the pound at the deli counter.

“I don’t understand the sexual assault part,” says Roy through a downturned mouth, “Why just groping? Why not rape her?”

“He didn’t rape her because he didn’t want to,” says Holden immediately, without taking his eyes off Bill, “He wanted to dominate and humiliate her.”

Bill nods in agreement. It’s not a full inclination of his head, just a tensing of his jaw and neck muscles. But Holden can recognize it as agreement. Discerning his tiny muscle tics and facial tremors has become second nature to him. Like how his ears will twitch if he finds something funny just as a smile pricks his lips. Or how he holds a cigarette like John Wayne when he’s relaxed but pinched between his thumb and middle finger when he’s smoking to take the edge off.

“Guys in unhappy marriages have hair triggers,” Bill asserts to Roy, “They lash out. Especially when it comes to women.”

Holden hasn’t noticed that. Bill doesn’t have hair triggers. He’s never seen him lash out. He’s not even a grouch, despite what his desk job paunch and military crewcut may suggest.

Maybe Bill isn’t in an unhappy marriage. Maybe the miles that road school puts between him and Nancy don’t make his marriage unhappy. Maybe they’re the only thing that makes it bearable. Is he a symptom of Bill’s unhappy marriage or a cause of its unhappiness?

They change their profile to better match the new evidence and Roy is frustrated. But they’re right. Holden knows they’re right. He can feel it even before he sees Dwight Taylor’s grainy black and white police station photo. He and Bill are onto something and mired in something. He can’t quite define either.

** _x — x — x_ **

The recognition after their successful apprehension of Dwight Taylor feels good. It feels… vindicating. The beer that Holden is handed by a rosy cheeked beat cop at the Sacramento Police Station comes with a hearty pat on the back. These people are impressed with him. They feel like they were a part of this. They’re acknowledging his efforts. They think of him as part of their team.

More importantly, his profiling was accurate. Not just theoretically accurate in a classroom setting. Not just academically useful in a research setting. Applicable. Demonstrative. Actionable. It caught a bad guy. _He_ caught a bad guy. With Bill. They caught a bad guy. Together. With his methods. Their methods. The methods they were using.

“Hey,” he says to Bill as he fumbles with their motel room keys. His suitcase is in his other hand and the lock is giving him some trouble. They have both been drinking. 

“Hey,” Holden says again, slipping an arm around Bill’s middle under his jacket. He pulls himself against his back and rests his chin on his left shoulder, with his mouth right by his ear.

“Care to lead the way into my study, Mr. Watson?” he slurs.

“It’s Doctor,” says Bill as he manages to force the door open. He sounds annoyed. Holden hangs back for a moment as he watches him walk through the doorway into the dark motel room and feel along the wall for a light switch.

“What?” he manages. The night is cold, and he notices the chill much more for the absence of Bill’s warm back pressed against him.

“I said,” Bill flicks on the light and puts his suitcase down, “It’s Doctor. His name is Doctor Watson. And not tonight.”

Holden does his best to look annoyed rather than offended. He’s not sure what Bill has on his mind that isn’t their unequivocal success or the praise lain like laurels at their feet by the local PD.

“Okay,” he says. Bill says nothing. They get ready for bed in silence. Bill doesn’t even turn on the tv.

A couple hours after they’ve gone to bed, and about thirty minutes past when Holden started pretending to be asleep, Bill picks up the hotel phone. Holden can hear the rotary dial clicking into place.

“Hey, Nance,” Bill says softly. He’s covering his mouth with his hand. He can’t whisper or else she won’t hear him. It’s too breathy to whisper over the phone, especially with the cheap motel mouthpieces. He does his best to lower his voice, and moves his chair as close to the window — and therefore as far from Holden’s bed — as it will go.

It feels wrong to be this close to Bill’s wife, even if she has only ever been a muffled voice on the other side of a phone. Her voice is in the same room as his body, which is marked by the touch of her husband. For a moment Holden can picture two warring phantoms in the air around him. A voice pulled through a thousand miles of telephone lines. Fingerprints on his skin. They weave together in his mind’s eye like multicolored smoke.

He cannot sleep until the wee hours of the morning, though he pretends to. He suspects that Bill can’t either.

** _x — x — x_ **

Bill puts his hand on Holden’s thigh as they drive through the rural Sacramento county countryside. It’s late, and though Holden knows that there are rolling golden hills on either side of them, outside the car it’s pitch black. There is just over a hundred miles between Solano State Prison in Vacaville and their two bed motel room in Sacramento. He’s noticed that Bill has been renting automatics lately, so he can keep his hand on Holden’s thigh when they travel like he’s his high school girlfriend. He watches a self satisfied smile spread over his broad face when he brushes his fingers over his dick.

Holden’s breath hitches. He wants Bill to undo his belt and jack him off while trying to keep his eyes on the road. He wants to do his best to distract him, knowing it could kill them both if he does a good enough job. _So, I'm home, walking up the stairs to our apartment with a freshly severed head draining about a pint of blood into a duffel bag._

“You wanna grab something to eat?”

“Huh?” Oh. There’s a twenty four hour diner up ahead, its neon sign blazing through the night.

“Come on, I could go for a beer. My treat.” _I was her toy all my life, right up until the moment I cut off her head with a hunting knife._

“Yeah, sure,” says Holden, splaying his legs and watching Bill’s fingers curl along the inside of his thigh, “Sure, I could go for a beer.” _I had this craving, this awful raging, eating, feeling inside of me._

They park and Bill tells him to wait outside like they’re headed into a drive in movie. He likes that. He half expects him to lean over and kiss him when he comes to set a six pack down on the hood. He doesn’t. He says he ordered burgers. Holden offers half heartedly to split the cost of dinner and Bill waves him off, goes back inside to grab their meals. They clink their bottles together when he returns, saluting a job well done, washing the taste of their shared serial killer pizza out of their mouths with piss yellow side of the road beer.

“So,” says Holden, watching his own reflection in the passenger’s side window, “you like your mom?”

Bill pauses with a handful of fries halfway to his mouth. Holden can feel his own foot jammed all the way into his.

“Sorry,” he says sheepishly, “Not funny.”

“Yeah,” says Bill calmly, “I liked my mom. But she’s not around anymore.”

“You like your wife?” Holden follows. Maybe too quickly. Maybe it was too obvious that he was looking desperately for an excuse to ask.

“Yes, I do.” Well that’s to be expected. Of course he would say that.

“That’s good,” Holden lies.

“I’ve known her all my life,” Oh? A qualifier? That’s unlike Bill. He’s plain spoken. He says what he means. It’s part of his salt of the earth, old world charm. “I’m not sure what I’d do without her.”

Holden struggles to keep his expression neutral as he thinks of all the thousands of hours Bill does spend without her. Day in and day out. On the road, at his desk, on a plane, or in a golf cart.

“How about that girlfriend?”

“Yeah,” Holden answers, sincerely, “She’s great. Smart. I think she actually likes me.” It still astounds him. He has to repeat it to another person or the fact of it might evaporate into thin air. He means it just as much as he is trying to convince himself of it.

“Sounds like we got it made.”

** _x — x — x_ **

“I could impale you with this nail file.”

“You would be a very compelling interviewee.”

The tip of Debbie’s nail file is surprisingly sharp and cold against Holden’s throat. His skin is warm from his shower, the bathroom is still steamy because of it. Her knees flex under his hands, into his touch.

He doesn’t think he means it. This isn’t… the same.

There is a raw animal instinct to run as fast as his legs can carry him when Kemper touches him. When he squeezes his larynx between his thick fingertips, or else draws them across his neck to demonstrate proper throat slitting technique. The same panic does not rise in him now, though he notes that Debbie has the nail file pointed right against his carotid artery. If she were to stab straight through she would hit his jugular as well before her makeshift blade hit bone. Thinking of that changes nothing. 

She is very beautiful. It was very kind of her to have come when he asked. He really did need to see her. But this was a poor imitation of what he wanted. Even Bill’s hands were dwarfed in comparison. Even Bill’s grip couldn’t take his voice away for an afternoon, though other parts had tried. 

He wanted her. He had her. He wanted Bill. He had him some of the time. He wanted something else more. He suspected that he would soon want it bad enough to reach for it. He lowers his head down between her thighs. He tries to remember what she taught him. _There’s nothing behind Kemper’s eyes,_ Bill had told him, _It’s like staring into a black hole. _

_Women are born with this little hole between their legs which every man on earth just wants to stick something into._

_Did your mother humiliate you?_

** _x — x — x_ **

Bill’s suggestion to invite Dr. Carr to consult on their work had been a welcome surprise. It must have been to her as well, because she agreed to come as soon as he pitched the idea. He’d done so over their basement telephone. He and Holden had high fived afterwards.

They stood, now, by the front entrance to Quantico, waiting for her.

“So,” Holden says, jamming his hands into his coat pockets, “you and Dr. Carr go back?”

“I consulted with her on a few cases here and there. We go back a few years,” says Bill, “Why do you ask?”

“Just curious,” Holden lies.

“No,” says Bill forcefully out into the air.

“No?” He lies again.

“You know what I mean.”

“I didn’t mean to imply-“ It’s hard to stop now that he’s started.

“I enjoy being married, thank you.” And it seems to be catching.

“I didn’t mean-“ denial wasn’t working but Holden couldn’t find another strategy in so short a time, “Just… Wendy has something.”

He hadn’t intended to go with honesty but it had slipped out anyway, “Not sexual.”

But it seemed stupid to switch back now, “Maybe a little sexual.”

Once his mouth was open, Holden found it very hard to shut it, especially with Bill stonewalling as effectively as he was.

“But her ideas and her energy…” if Bill’s thin smile widened a hair more it would cleave his head in two, “I sound like an idiot.”

“You sound like you have a crush on teacher,” Bill’s tone is, as always, calm and measured. It does nothing to take the sting off his accusation.

“It’s just… someone like her embracing this project says something.” That’s all it was. Academic validity. Peer review. Were they peers? That was exciting. “Don’t you think?”

“I get it,” says Bill evenly, “Old Man Tench jumps onboard, so what? Grumpy Old Shepard, who cares? But the foxy professor-“

“That’s not fair,” it wasn’t because she was foxy. It was because she was a professor. Though the foxiness helped. Holden would’ve defended himself further if he hadn’t seen her taxi pulling up toward them. He ran to greet it. He noticed that Bill kept pace.


	4. Episode 4

They are in Virginia State Penitentiary interviewing a twenty something Montie Rissell who raped and killed — and sometimes both-ed — seventeen women in the span of nine months.

Monte is small with close cropped hair and a nasally voice. He is petulant and demanding, and the thought of the FBI traveling a few hours out of their way to ask him questions clearly gets the blood rushing to his head. He has no presence. He lacks depth. Holden finds him wholly uninteresting.

But he does enjoy watching Bill play bad cop. 

Bill doesn’t like the men they’re set to interview. That’s to be expected, of course, Holden doesn’t like them either. But Holden can take a scientific view of things. He can play the impartial observer. He can gain insight from these men. Not to say that Bill can’t. He’s more than capable. He’s an excellent profiler. But he can’t do it without giving himself indigestion. Holden watches his knuckles go white against the steering wheel sometimes as they discuss their subjects. These men offend him. Their actions hurt him because they debase everything he stands for. 

Despite the inconvenience it may cause in their work, Holden likes that about him. It’s impossible not to.

Since they’ve begun partnering with Wendy, Holden has mentally compared their task to entomology. Working with live specimens. It takes a certain level of tolerance and mettle well outside the norm to study what they do. Even more so since they are the first to do so.

“It's like the idea of doing it pops in your head like a… like a sneeze. You know what I mean?” Montie glances at him as he asks, reaching out for camaraderie. Holden stops short of nodding, instead blinking a little more forcefully than normal. It seems to do the trick.

It feels… he can’t think of a word for how it feels that Montie relates to him. They are closer in age than he is to Bill. They are closer in age than Holden is to Bill, frankly. And Holden looks young, he knows that. This job in particular makes him aware of it. Montie Rissell, sitting across from him in his dirty prison jumpsuit, picking at his dry cuticles, has done some profiling of his own. He thinks the two of them aren’t so different. He thinks Holden thinks the same way that he does. Thinks the same _things_ that he does. Thinks that he too would choose small, young, female prey who couldn't fight back in a display of animal cunning.

That’s fine. This interview needs a good cop. But Holden isn’t playing good cop. He’s playing fellow dim witted, violent, hillbilly rapist. He doesn’t care for it, but it is effective. It can help them collect data. Montie’s descriptions aren’t poetic but they’re detailed. Holden and Bill play well off each other. Like they did with Dwight Taylor. Like they do generally.

“What?” Oh no.

“Come on kid,” Holden recognizes the shift in Bill’s tone from resigned condemnation to outright anger, but he isn’t fast enough to catch it, “you don’t expect us to buy that mercy horseshit.”

“I think what Agent Tench means is — “

“I think I’ve had enough science for today,” Montie cuts him short. He crosses his arms and leans back in his chair, stonewalling. “Throat’s a little dry.”

They call for the guard. They pack up the tape recorder. They retrieve their guns and badges from the guard station. They make their way across the parking lot, all in silence.

“Maybe,” says Holden carefully, keeping his eyes forward, “next time you should be careful — “ 

“Holden,” says Bill icily. 

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to. I get it. Let’s move on.” A certain softness comes across his face and disappears just as quickly.

“I wasn’t going to reprimand you,” Holden says in a tone he hopes comes across as comforting instead of defensive.

“I certainly hope not.” Okay, damn it didn’t come across as either.

“Okay,” says Holden quickly, “we’re moving on.”

** _x — x — x_ **

He is at a payphone at a bar somewhere near Richmond. Debbie is on the other end of the line. There is an atonal ringing in his ears and a dull ache all along the right side of his neck. He is telling her that it’s fine and he understands, but it’s not and he doesn’t. It just wouldn’t be appropriate to say so right now. Damn, his neck really hurts. So does his chest, from where his seat belt had pressed hard against it, preventing him from flying off through the driver’s side window of their rental car at eighty miles an hour.

“Debbie says ‘hi’”, he says to Bill when he takes a seat next to him. Bill has ordered him a whiskey. He is on his second glass. Holden is telling him that it’s fine and he understands, but before he can stop himself he’s telling him that it isn’t and he doesn’t. He can be honest with Bill. He can always be honest with Bill.

But suddenly Bill is being honest with him in a way he’s never been before. It comes spilling out of him like a flood from a burst dam; succumbed to inevitable architectural failure. He and Nancy can’t have children, but have always wanted them. They adopted a boy. A beautiful boy. But it isn’t going well. The phrase settles across Bill’s shoulders like a dogwood cross.

“I feel like we’re failing him somehow,” he says, and the strain in his voice pulls a loop of wire tight around Holden’s own throat.

“I’m sure you aren’t,” he says, because what else is there to say? When has Bill Tench ever failed anyone? When has Bill Tench ever been anything other than stoic and honor bound and dependable? Bill Tench is the Platonic ideal of a man you would call at three in the morning when you were up shit creek out of luck without a paddle in sight.

Is this where his general aura of fatherly support came from? Was it just a directionless overflow? Was that where his faith in this project came from? Displacement? Projection?

“You have no idea what I’m trying to say, do you?” Bill laughs as he says it. A single, breathy sigh carried on a resigned smile.

“No,” Holden admits. Was he wrong? Was he being cruel? Maybe this was simply an outburst of a deep and secret sadness that for this moment Bill could no longer carry, like a tree weeping amber. He was being entrusted with it. This wasn’t an explanation. This wasn’t an excuse. He wasn’t being offered a justification. He was being given a chance to shoulder the burden. There is a processional route through the Old City of Jerusalem where it is believed that Christ made his way toward his execution. There is a stone in a narrow alleyway that sinks into the wall it is a part of, rubbed smooth and concave by millions of pilgrims resting their palms where they believe their Lord once rested His.

Maybe he was wrong about this. _This_ being whatever it was that they carried between them. This being whatever it was Bill carried alone. Holden’s stomach drops out as he thinks of what else he could be wrong about, what other trees he hasn’t seen for surveying the forest they make together.

“But I want to.” But he’s too late. The moment passes. Bill waves him off.

“Call Debbie,” he says softly over the rim of his whiskey glass, “tell her she can pick us up tomorrow.”

** _x — x — x_ **

This is the second time he has come to Bill’s house. The second time he has stayed in the car in front of it. They’re going to the airport to carry on with Road School; flying north to Pennsylvania.

Bill isn’t alone this time. Nancy comes out to bid him goodbye. And that must be Brian. He’s small for his age. He looks nothing like his parents. Holden reminds himself he’s an idiot for assuming he would.

This is the first time he’s seen Nancy’s face. Bill doesn’t have any photos of her in their basement office. He hadn’t had any photos of her before they relocated either. Her hair is blonde and permed. Holden is terrified her eyes will meet his. He tries to match her face to the ghost of her voice that has haunted so many shared motel rooms and airport lounges. She doesn’t look like he’d expected she would; frail and haunted. She looks… normal. Like a woman bidding her husband goodbye when she’d rather he’d stay. Her haunting of him is his own doing. He wonders if she haunts Bill the same way, if her voice ghosts through his idle mind like it does his. He wonders if he thinks of her often or with fondness. How much space does she take up in Bill’s life when he’s away? More than she does when he isn’t? Less?

Bill gets in the car.

“Ready?”

“Yep.”

** _x — x — x_ **

“When you’re married, it’s a contract. There’s children, a mortgage, a house to keep up, almost like a business. Only you can’t quit.”

They are in cop car being driven through the small town of Altoona by Detective Mark Ocasek, a very bald, very apprehensive man in very far out of his depth in the face of the violent murder of a very young girl. He and Holden are starting to feel incredibly uncomfortable. Bill’s speech from the back seat is starting to suck the air out vehicle. Holden can almost feel the change in atmospheric pressure.

“She cant fire you,” Bill continues, “Stock goes up, stock does down, it doesn’t matter. You’re trapped.” Listening to him explain his reasoning is like letting your eyes adjust to an optical illusion. You look at it and you see a rabbit. An old woman. A couple married for twenty five years. You tilt your head and you see a duck. A princess. An animal gnawing through its mangled leg to escape a well placed snare.

“Unless you want to bring on the lawyers and open Pandora’s box.”

Mark and Holden look very pointedly at the road in front of them, as if Bill’s eyes in the rear view mirror might turn them to stone.

“Resentment builds on both sides. A thousand tiny cuts… If Alvin Moran had a married man’s anger,” Bill concludes, “he’d have tortured, then killed her. No question in my mind.”

Was Holden a manifestation of Bill’s anger? Was it a married man’s anger that had closed the distance between them the first time? That had continued to bridge the distance between their twin beds a hundred times afterwards? Did Bill put his hands on his body to channel his resentment? Was he closing his teeth around his own exposed bone?

It didn’t feel like anger. Not to Holden it didn’t. He couldn’t speak for Bill. He could only guess. Well, he could analyze, which meant he could make a rather well educated guess. But it didn’t feel like anger. Not from behind over the sink after a shower. Not on the well worn sculpted carpet because the bed frame creaked too loud. Not from his knees. Not from his back. It could almost feel like love when it was on the same side of a booth at a diner on Route 40. In the late afternoon at the side of an over chlorinated pool. At two in the morning cracking jokes in front of a broken soda machine. Otherwise it mostly felt like lust, or at least the indulgent culmination of misdirected affection.

Is that something a married man’s anger could do? Dress itself up like love? Leave a girl scalped and dismembered at a garbage dump? 

Guys in unhappy marriages have hair triggers. A married man’s anger would make him torture the girl while she was still alive. Holden’s mouth feels dry.


	5. Episode 5

Benjamin Barnwright is crying. Sniveling, really. He’s sitting at the edge of a shabby old couch in urgent need of re-upholstery, his spindly, delicate limbs tucked close to his body like a cave spider. He is reacting to gristly details of his late girlfriend’s murder. Details he shouldn’t know about but clearly does.

Holden has never been good at handling people’s tears. He’s been called calloused. But this feels more than uncomfortable or socially unprecedented. It makes his skin crawl like taking the trash out a couple days late and realizing there are maggots in it. It’s disturbing in a way that worms its way under your skin. It feels almost violating.

They leave quickly, he, Bill, and Detective Mark Ocaseck nearly flinging themselves over his threshold into the chilly afternoon. 

Bill is first to speak when they pile into Ocaseck’s police cruiser, the aged heater already struggling to perform its duties.

“Mark? Seriously?”

“He only knows about the breasts,” Mark admits sheepishly. Bill scoffs.

“It was another officer,” the excuses come out of Mark rapidly, “It’s hard to keep this quiet.” His breath comes forth in little white puffs, each of them carrying a halfway apologetic detail of how this case has been mishandled.

“I want to talk to Mrs. Barnwright,” says Bill tersely, “Should we stop at a pay phone? Give her a heads up, too?”

“I think that’d be fair,” Mark bleats. Bill throws himself back against his seat in frustration. Holden should be angry as well. He should be annoyed at how poorly the investigation is going. He should be resentful of how much Mark is muddling what, in larger cities, would be handled by a standard process of police investigation.

He isn’t. He feels divorced from it for the moment. Instead he feels… vindicated that Bill feels all of those things. Gone are his soft excuses and his low balls. He is no longer giving a small town police force with a heart of gold the benefit of the doubt. He thinks they’re all incompetent backwoods simpletons.

Which is what Holden said immediately. He shouldn’t be happy about this and he shouldn’t be smug. But he is. And watching Bill stew in the passenger seat is more rewarding than it should be.

He was right. He is right. He is right often about many things. He will, very soon, be right about this. About who killed this young girl. He will figure it out and it will be another in what is becoming a long line of successes. Holden breathes into his cupped hands to stop his fingers from going numb. To hide his grin.

** _x — x — x_ **

Holden makes a spur of the moment decision to go to Debbie’s right after he leaves the airport, where he dropped Wendy off for her flight back to Boston. His conversation with her had been stimulating. Intellectually. He wasn’t done thinking about the Altoona case. He wanted to share the details. He wanted to share his insight. He wanted to see her. Debbie. He wanted to see Debbie.

She didn’t seem to want to see him.

She was busy writing a paper. Pulling an all nighter. If she managed her time better she wouldn’t have to. Her friend had given her diet pills to help her focus. She scoffs at him when he expresses concern over their contents. But she plays hostess, offering coffee, tea, or beer. Holden asks for tea.

Her kitchen table is small and second hand. She makes herself a cup but doesn’t sit down next to him. She doesn’t have time for him. For this. She doesn’t want to make time for it. Holden thinks that grad school is only a priority when it helps her avoid him. He brings Benji up anyway.

“We were asking him details about his fiancé and he just… burst into tears. Bill thought he was bullshitting, but psychopaths are extremely skilled at mimicking human emotions,” He doesn’t cite the quote. He doesn’t feel like telling her he’s already discussed this with Dr. Carr. She is dismissive.

“Well I once went crying to my professor.” Her back is to him. She’s fussing with her mug. Halfway engaged.

“You fake cried?”

“I made up an elaborate story about my dad in some horrendous accident,” Debbie smiles. She’s proud of it.

“When was this?”

“My freshman year. I was partying a little too much. Almost flunked out of school.” She says it so casually. Was it casual? Was he being too judgmental? Obviously she didn’t flunk out. But she came close to it. Had she really changed since then? Did she really take things more seriously? Cramming for midterms and writing papers in overnight marathon sessions suggested that she didn’t. _Do you really believe that young, pretty girls can’t be manipulative?_

“The interesting thing was,” Debbie continues, bobbing her tea bag in and out of her mug, “while I was lying I actually started believing it. It made for a good show, he raised my grade to a C.”

And there it was.

“You teacher was male,” Holden sighs.

“What difference does it make?”

“Women crying to men always works,” Holden explains, “Men to men?” He scoffs and shakes his head. It couldn’t be more obvious how different the two scenarios were.

“Not my point.”

“Why were you drinking so much?” Holden asks before he can stop himself.

“I wanted to fit in,” Debbie shrugs, “I wanted to be wild and crazy.”

“Why?”

“I was tired of always thinking. Don’t you get tired of thinking?”

“No,” he says. He’s getting annoyed. This is asinine. This isn’t the studious, sensual, fiercely intelligent sociologist he came to see tonight. Was it the diet pills?

“And it made it easier to sleep with people.” She says this casually too. Like it’s obvious. Like it doesn’t matter. Holden stares into his over-steeped tea.

“How many people did you sleep with?”

“Let’s not.” She’s irritated. But is it because she’s defensive?

“A lot?”

“What difference does it make?”

“Just curious,” he lies.

“And judgmental.” She isn’t wrong. But did he have a reason to be judgmental? Had she done something worth judging? Why was she sensitive about her promiscuity but not her blatant manipulation? She could admit to lying to her professor but she couldn’t admit how many people she’d bedded. People. She had said ‘people’, not ‘men’.

“Five?” he hazards. She ignores him.

“Ten?”

“This is getting tedious.” It isn’t like him to forcefully press a subject but it’s less like her to so pointedly avoid one.

“Ten,” he says. It’s no longer a question.

“Holden,” she’s leaving the kitchen, pressing her warm mug close to her, “I’m not doing this.”

It’s not like he expected to be her first. She had always been demonstratively more experienced in bed. Maybe he’d just hoped that she’d learned it all from one person. Two people. Three people, maybe. But ten? More than ten? She was younger than him. Maybe that’s why it bothered him so much. It’s not like he was being the most honest person in the world. Was she being dishonest? Was she touchy because even now the number was slowly ticking upwards? Quickly ticking upwards?

Wow. Ten.

** _x — x — x_ **

Mark Ocaseck calls Bill’s desk line in a lather. Benji Barnwright’s brother-in-law is a violent offender. He spent time at a psych hospital as a troubled youth for beating a young girl with a monkey wrench. Bill says they’ll be right there. Holden already has his jacket on. They drive north.

Ocaseck is antsy when they arrive at the Altoona police station, eager to begin their questioning. Bill stops him. Asks for a cup of coffee. Wants to let the guy stew for a while. Their host is impressed by the move, Holden can see it written plainly on his face. Wow. An FBI interrogation. Gee willikers.

Frank Janderman is solidly built, wearing a mustache too severe for his features. His eyes are beady and his hair could use a wash. Bill and Holden settle into a comfortable rhythm with their questioning. Big boss and the intrepid rookie investigator. It flows naturally.

Frank is unpleasant and maladjusted but uninteresting. That he bludgeoned a young girl with a monkey wrench is not hard to believe, but it isn’t engaging.

It’s not just the degree of their violence that makes sequence killers interesting. It certainly contributes to what makes them worth studying. The visceral reactions it draws from legislatures, lawyers, and stuffed shirts is responsible for the majority of their funding to do so. But it’s their methodology that makes them worthy subjects. Their process. As Holden, Bill, and Dr.Carr work away in their basement office cataloguing, processing, and analyzing the debased actions of select group of men they have at their (and the federal government’s) disposal, a similar and potentially larger group of men are conducting their own analyses, performing their own rituals, and honing their own crafts. Out in the wild. The great wide yonder. The observer influences the object which he observes. Gaze not into the abyss lest it gaze also into ye.

Frank isn’t difficult to engage. He was convicted for brutal violence against a young woman he was romantically involved with. He married a woman many years his junior. He resents any implied “closeness” with his limp wristed brother in law. 

“What’s this ‘close’ shit?” he snaps, “that’s like women.”

Femininity is threatening to him because women are detestable. Disposable. Okay, sure. Holden can work with that. But wait, they don’t have the whole story. He didn’t come at the girl unprovoked, it was self defense. The psychiatric prison stay was part of his plea deal. He’s not that bad a guy, really. 

“I was running around like a jackass back then.”

“But no longer?”

“I’m married now. Got a kid.”

“Marriage and fatherhood don’t make anger go away.”

Holden files the comment away in his near to bursting mental Rolodex of the truly terrifying things Bill casually reveals about his twenty year marriage and turns back to the task at hand.

So he wasn’t angry, just misunderstood. Sure that makes him sound like a pussy, but he’d rather sound like a pussy than look suspicious in front of two federal investigators. Okay, so he’s not a monster. Just a regular guy. Holden can be a regular guy. Frank rates Beverly Jean a seven out of ten.

“Really?” says Holden, “from the photos I’d have given her an eight.” _The coroner’s report describes a jagged incision made from her vaginal opening to her anus._

“In Altoona she’s a solid eight.” _They were unable to identify the instrument used to amputate both breasts._ “I thought Benji had done pretty good for himself.”

“Especially for a guy who’s so quick to cry,” says Holden sympathetically.

“Shit yeah,” Frank raises his eyebrows in concession. Holden catches a glimpse of Bill’s downturned mouth and sternly furrowed eyebrows. Needling low life backwoods offenders was one thing, speaking ill of the young girl gutted like an abhorred animal was another. They each had their part to play.

“Do you think he was satisfying her?”

Frank exhales and runs his hands down his thighs, making a show of his reluctance to breech the subject before doing so with ease.  
“I don’t think he was blowing her mind.”

“Did she tell you that?” _Ligature marks observed at wrists and ankles. Extensive tearing and bruising evident at both sites. _

“Not in so many words. But when a chick’s enjoying it, she’s all over you.” _Victim’s intestines sustained damage due to severity of post mortem genital mutilation._

“Do you think Beverly Jean knew the difference?” Holden ignores the disgust spreading over Bill’s face and focuses on the blasé resignation spreading across Frank’s, “You think she’d… you know. Been around?” _Lack of insect infestation and animal trauma indicates the body was placed at the Wopsononock dump some days after her murder on Wednesday night._

“I’d say she was, uh,” he pretends to care about seeming diplomatic, “open.” _Victim sustained two black eyes, broken jaw, and multiple stab wounds before her death, most likely due to blood loss._

“Did Benji see it that way too?”

“I don’t know if he didn’t get it, or he just didn’t want to.”

Later, when Mark expresses shock at the revelation, Holden reminds him that no one wants to be the first to admit the dead girl was easy. 

It comes more easily to him, now, to sympathize with their subjects, whether they’re brought before him for studying or for questioning. To emulate them. It wasn’t empathy so much as mimicry. Like partnering up in class to play mirror. The longer you did it, the more you and your reflection would sync up, until prolonged and uncomfortable eye contact turned into connection and communication. So far Taylor, Rissell, and Janderman were unidirectional, with Holden playing the silver backed glass. Wholly unlike Kemper, who had nothing in his eyes. Looking into them was a reenactment of Escher’s Hand With Reflective Sphere. One of these days, the lights would come up from the crushing darkness of the abyss, the illusion would fade away, and he would see clearly to the other side.

He dared not think what chthonic beast would unveil itself therein.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's posting marks the beginning of this work's hiatus! Thank you to everyone who has read this far.


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